Archive for the ‘books’ tag
Heartless?
It was a joy to come in to work today to find that my aggressive tidying of last week sent the message to the cleaning crew that they could go ahead and scrub all the surfaces down. It’s all much calmer in here.
Over the weekend I read through “Visitors From Oz”, a book I learned about from reading Martin Gardner’s obituary. It’s one of the oddest things I’ve ever read, a kind of advanced fanfic that jumbles together a bunch of Garnder’s interests and contains bizarre scenes like the one where Dorothy, back in the US after nearly one hundred years of living in Oz, single-handedly subdues a hijacker on an airplane who has been screaming about his love of Saddam Hussein. Given that it was written in 1998 this is not quite as dark as it might seem, but still. Much of the writing verges on a parody of Baum’s style, especially that of the latter Oz books, where characters tend to helpfully remind each other of their backstories, as a way of getting the readers up to speed. But Gardener has them do this almost every chapter, which keeps the characters from being very distinct from each other, and also tends to impede the forward momentum of the narrative.
the book also contains a major crossover section, where we find out that the Lands described in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are actually contained within Oz. But just when you think you’re going to get a face-off between Baum’s common sense whimsy and Carroll’s verbal absurdity, all of the fun is drained out of the whole conceit by having the Carroll characters assert over and over again how he wrote about them inaccurately and how they are actually very sensible and even tempered. You have to ask yourself what exactly was the purpose of that, coming form the man who wrote “The Annotated Alice”.
Gardner was a great lover of Oz, and helped to establish its earliest fan organization, so his decisions here seem all the odder. The book was written when he was in his eighties, and it seems to be partially an attempt to summon up all the things he enjoys in Baum’s books and partially a grab bag of his other interests. I don’t at all regret reading it, but I am still deeply puzzled by it.
Tags: books, Martin Gardner, OzRelated posts
There’s probably a peanut in there somewhere…
I’m trying to work up interest for my current book It Didn’t Happen Here, an analysis of the failures of American Socialism. It’s got all the hallmarks of “doctoral thesis turned to book”, and you may have guessed that that doesn’t translate to “gripping prose style”. Thing is, I have a very hard time just scanning: usually once I crack the cover on a book I tend to go all the way through.
But I think I know the answer to this already: Marxism, while providing a compelling analysis of societies where capital is aligned with fixed class structures, it has not proved to be a useful predictive tool in any meaningful sense. It combines the rationalism of the enlightenment with the mechanistic world view of the nineteenth, and as such has a hard time imagining situations where groups of people act in irrational ways. For example: the church in Europe has been for the most part an agent of class conservatism, even after the reformation. In the US, religious vitality has more often than not been the result of class resentment and anti-authoritarianism. Thus it was much easier to organize a proletariat in Europe by attacking organized religion.
So perhaps the question shouldn’t be why didn’t Socialism succeed in America, but rather why should we expect it to? In any event, unless something unexpected interrupts the assertion-proof-citation-conclusion cycle, I may have to make an exception and just move along to another volume.
Tags: books, daily photo, politicsRelated posts
On the ground, or why this post doesn’t have a snappy title…
More time mucking about with the Nikon. I’m beginning to warm to it, although I hate using the view finder. It irritates me always having the camera lens identified with the eye.
I’ve just finished Jaron Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget, a driven critique of online life and current trends in computing. Jaron was a Bard while I was there, and gained a reputation as a “cyber-visionary” in the late 80′s, so he’s not coming at this from an anti-tech perspective. He understands the ways that the architecture of the internet and especially what has been touted at Web 2.0 information structures can diminish the possibilities for social conciousness not to mention social change. He’s particularly savage about structures build on information aggregation such as Google, Facebook and Wikipedia.
There’s a lot in the book that mirrors recent thoughts I’ve been having, and I’m happy to see how forcefully he argues for the individual quirks of each of us as being the most valuable. Some of it is meandering, but it’s core thesis, that the advocates of computer convergence and transcendence are leading us down a path of moral philosophical and fiscal collapse, is bitingly apt.
I was thinking about this last night when discussing the ways that online interactions can drive out nuanced communication between people: say you have a profile somewhere online, like a dating site. When you fill it out, you have a a space restriction. You are tempted to be terse and in doing so reach for those words that will have the most impact. You are also driven by the language of those around you: saying you enjoy something seems tepid compared to saying IT RULEZ!!!!!. The temptation to grab for the most attention in the shortest time echoes throughout our current media. In essence we are all being encouraged to think like advertisers, the field that has had the most experience with shocking imagery and punchy slogans. Advertising is all about stopping the thought process and starting the purchase process. It tries to avoid ambiguity, deploying it only in certain situations as an enticement to find resolution by identifying what’s for sale. It revels in repetition, regularity.
I think that as communication vehicles become more and more condensed, the temptation is to make each utterance louder and more aggressive. There are people who’s blogs I read online who seem to describe themselves in only two states of consciousness: utter ecstasy, or dire peril. Either they are orgamsing over a cupcake they ate or they are going to commit suicide because a lightbulb burned out. These are not shallow people, but they have adopted a rhetorical structure to represent their experience that makes them seem shallow. And certain aspects of online communities reward that rhetoric by normalizing it.
Over the past year I’ve been reading a number of blogs about blogging, sites like problogger or copyblogger or writetodone. I got started with them by chance, thinking that they were about “productivity” in some way, but now I see that they are about trying to monetize the online experience. There are endless posts about SEO (for and against), about “passion” in your writing, about “storytelling” and message delivery. It’s a weird mix of hucksterism and self actualization and the more I’ve read it the more I’ve worried about my own blog, whether I could be upping my page rankings and so on.
I don’t need to point out to you that this is ludicrous, but it’s the subtle pressure of groupthink combined with technology structures that tempts me down that path. Because the web offers something that I have come to think of as response, I become habituated to and desirous of that response. On livejournal it’s the number of comments. On twitter it’s chat and retweets, on tumblr it’s “likes” and new “followers”. “Friends” on Facebook. Google analytics shows me how many people looked at my website daily, how long they stayed and what they looked at. But it tells me nothing about the individual nature of those “visits”, turning all of them into the same interchangeable units of time and click. And I think in doing so, it has encouraged me to devalue them.
I’m going to risk a formulation here: Social structures that rely on interchangeability inevitably produce cheapness, creating junk. Making food stuffs interchangeable in their production and distribution produces junk food. Interchangeable bits produce junk thought and junk emotion. When you have one unit of currency, you think you know the value of everything because you have a convenient way to measure it. But ultimately, such measuring devices are zombies, killing off every thing that doesn’t fit to their standard, and making all else the same. Once everyone is screaming at the same pitch, anything we might meaningfully call communication ceases. Sure, everyone speaks, everyone is heard, but “hearing” and “speaking” no longer mean anything.
I’m not yet sure where I’m going with this, in terms of what it might mean for my own practices. But I do know that I’m going to take a close look at what I choose to do online, and where I choose to do it.
Jaron’s book is well worth the read – I’d urge you to pick it up.
Tags: advertising, books, daily photo, Jaron Lanier, online life, rantlet, readingRelated posts
Trash and Blur…
If you have time and 75.00 this weekend you should come and spend them both at Postcards from the edge VisualAIDS’s annual benefit, that allows you to buy great art inexpensively and support the practices and legacies of HIV+ artists at the same time. I have something in there as well as many more talented people.
I’m also going to have a few pieces up on display around town this month, which should be fun.
I left my David Antin book in the office, so that has meant that in the interim I’m reading other things: I finished The Best Sex Writing 2010 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. A mixed bag, but generally a good quick read. I can think of any number of people here on LJ whose posts would make excellent, thoughtful contributions. And I’m just starting in on Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. So far I’m unimpressed, but it’s early days yet. At this rate I should have no trouble getting through those 52 books this year.
A few years back, someone asked me about what they perceived as my nostalgia for a lost time in San Francisco and I explained that my real yen was for New York at the time of my teen age years. Yesterday I stumbled across the home site of Allan Tannenbaum and through it an amazing gallery of photographs of New York in the Seventies much of it shot for the late, lamented Soho Weekly News. If you ignore the shockingly bad web design and look under the section called “Mondo Art” – you get a glimpse of the kinds of events and people that I so desperately wanted to be part of growing up. Is it any wonder I take so many black and white pictures?
And here is something else I ran into on-line this morning:
Let’s hope Latawnya learns her lesson!
Tags: a book a week, art world, big link friday, books, daily photo, new york in black and white, night, photography, readingRelated posts
Say your prayers, villain!
Shoulders aching. It’s been a bumbling weekend. A little sketching got done. Things interrupted other things. Saturday’s weather was simply wretched: sloppy not snow not rain, falling so slowly that it didn’t count as sleet either. But its damp and cold penetrated everywhere, especially for under-dressed me. I finished up reading The Year’s Best Science Fiction 14, but it was probably wrong to read it all at one go. I think the editors favor a kind or story that hits very predictable marks, and by then end of the anthology I was too often anticipating the plot twists to b e able to enjoy the writing.
Lately I’ve been trying to gingerly re-approach the things that were important to me as a kid: science fiction and comics and it’s a little bit rough going with both. There’s so much out there, and as in everything else, so much of it isn’t very good. I left comic fandom in part because of fatigue over drawn out punchfests that padded stories into multi issue affairs with very little actual payoff. In trying to pick them up again I’m seeing the same thing at work.
Of course genres are only as good as their individual practitioners, and my sample has been pretty small, so I shouldn’t really leap to conclusions. Still I’m much happier reading obscure kiddie comics from the fifties than today’s superhero offerings. And learning more from the drawings, too.
The new book is Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which is the kind of light non fiction that I love, but which always makes me faintly embarrassed, like I should know all this this stuff already, should have read the tougher science books that he is popularizing here. Truth is, it’s like a science fiction book itself, with the bones exposed: post apocalyptic, right? I’m comforted by the notion of the earth being able to continue on its way without the noisome presence of human beings, and even though artists are supposed to be in the immortality business, making things to outlast ourselves, I’m happy to contemplate the oblivion which awaits all of my works.
Tags: books, comics, daily photo, fandom, food, friends, weatherRelated posts
Flashing some Fur, and Big Link Friday….
ig link Friday is my sorry attempt at #followfriday as well as a fulfillment of my promise to make this blog more of a resource. Also I’m impressed with the way that people like Thor make their ljs about so much more than the repeated tracks of their obsessions. So here’s some of the stuff I’m enjoying these days. Hopefully it’ll spice up your weekend.
This weekend is the New York Art Book Fair, which gets more exhausting every year. It’s a fantastic event, but there is so much stuff. My bank account is already making whimpering sounds.
What’s great about the artists’ book thing is that it’s another example of D.I.Y. culture. Printed Matter has managed to bring together both the art and ‘zine strains of this into something that seems to be spawning a whole new generation of practitioners. It a way of making things that has been much on my mind lately.
Along with that, here’s a project that I ran across this week which is the first thing to make me interested in Star Wars in a long time: Star Wars Uncut, a project where random people are remaking the first movie in fifteen second chunks. There’s something so great about this: it’s a project that talks about the way that certain films get lodged in our collective memory, about methods community art making, and it treats the film as a kind of musical score. Watch the trailer: the bits that are finished so far are already awesome.
Along with communities coming together to make weird things happen with data there’s the more than slightly sleazy but totally safe for work I Just Made love a google map of where snu snu has just happened all over the world or at least where people want us to think it has happened. So now we can all broadcast our smug. I like the fact that they allow you to add a note to your record, as well as to let people know if you’re getting it on indoors or under heaven’s vault. You can zoom in to see if there’s anyone else on your block up to hanky panky.
After sex, what then? For many of us it’s video games, and as we all know the best video games are free and have “Donkey” in the title. So here’s Time Donkey, which is kind of like Groundhog Day with a donkey and also tacos. Wow, I wish I had some tacos right now. My breakfast is wearing off.
Speaking of clumsy transitions, I’ve been on a breakfast yogurt and muesli kick for the past few months ever since Sylt, and for the last two days the yogurt has come from Butterworks Farm. It has the kick that I remember yogurt having when I first tried it. My font of idle curiosity is endless and so i checked today to see if the company is online at all. The farm seems to be run by an earnest Vermont couple (with a studly husband by the name of Jack). I picked up the yogurt without much thinking, and now I’m surprised at how much more connected I feel with it after having looked at the website. This is what ad companies are spend millions to do theses days: to make us feel a personal connection to brands, with “web presence”. Have I just been tickled in my target audience spot by the home spun nature of Butterworks Farm’s site? In truth, I have no greater proximity to them now than when I was shoveling their milk product into my maw a few hours ago, yet I think I’m developing some brand loyalty.
That’s one of the tricks of digital media – it is both intimate and far away at the same time. Like yesterday Nick Frost retweeted me! That means we are totally super friends now, right?
Finally, if you like that drop cap that I began the post with, you should go over to this site where designer Jessica Hische is putting up one drop cap each day. Click through and look at the rest of her charming work.
P.S. Oh yeah – fur flashing: there’s some peeking out of the open collar there. And I got bored and braided my beard.
Tags: big link friday, books, food, movies, online life, sexRelated posts
Both very gutteral the two of them…
A mostly inward weekend. During much of it I was working my way through the backlog of podcasts from the New York Review of Books. I’d subscribed on iTunes and made the mistake of adding all of my missed ones to my iPhone at once. They took up a lot of room so I determined to plow through them. while there was a lot of blather, I was also rewarded by the experience of listening to John Ashbery read as series of poems, and making an easy way through what has always seemed to be spiky and bewildering on the page. So much so that I began to get the jokes, and found myself laughing out loud on the subway a couple of times.
The most recent p-cast reminded me of a writer who has meant a lot to me since I first encountered him in college: Flann O’Brian, or more precisely Myles na Gopaleen, author of the column The Cruiskeen Lawn, which with the writings of S.J. Perelman marked the alpha and omega of my idealized post-adolescent snark. Consider this example.
Our current time is so saturated with the trappings of satire that real satire cannot gain purchase; we don’t need the satirist to kick over the sandcastle of our beliefs because we’ve already demolished them ourselves. But both of these men knew how to write funny, to think aslant and be willing to leave their readers puffing along behind them, without dropping breadcrumbs like “Why is it that when ever I go to the DMV…” Their humor is work fueled by devastating invention and assumes a level of conversance at least as high as that demanded of the reader by Ashbery.Tough to imagine the mind of of the editor of the Irish Times when faced by the latest piece of Cruiskeen Lawn copy, especially since it often required special illustrations or typographic arrangements that would have played hell with the page layout.
In the podcast that put me back in mind of na Gopaleen, the idea was tossed out that the column, taken as a whole, was a work that stood alongside the best of O’Brian’s novels and made me think further about what could be the experience of this blog, were I to apply myself to it with some devotion.
www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/25
www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/27
Oh by the way: Dalkey Archive Press (named after a Flann O’Brian novel) is one of the best presses out there. So why not buy stuff from them directly? Also I think it was my friend David Henderson who introduced me to O’Brian.
Tags: books, daily photo, humor, Myles na Gopaleen, NYRB, podcasts, readingRelated posts
Life imitates art…
Draw what you know they say. Well it’s write what you know actually. But maybe that works for drawing too. Today was a funny one, many interesting conversations and thinking about issues, issues, issues. And then there was that lovely mango with lemon juice and chili. And then I went to see Taxidermia which had some cute chubby people in it. Oh and all the slaughtering and the metaphors and the half-assed balloon dancing. It’s a movie. Many things happen it. There’s a funny coin purse.
Other media just doesn’t excite me as much as my new copy of this. Quality reproductions of Chester Gould’s original boards are making me squirmy and moist. Talk about brutal; it’s shocking to think that people looked at it daily in the paper. You watch all of Dick Tracey’s hair burning off and it’s not a joke. Which reminds me that I have to get cracking on my own daily.
Tags: books, daily photo, drawing, food, movies